“Shut up, be happy. Obey all orders without question. The happiness you have demanded is now mandatory” — Jello Biafra, 1987 Command & control-ism comes in many forms, one of its more frustrating manifestations for product managers is that of the unfunded mandate. The concept of the unfunded mandate comes from the politically-charged world of hierarchal…
Tag: Software Development
Tiny Features, In Release — yet another #prodMgmt parody song lyric
Yet another #prodMgmt song parody, this one inspired by both the practice of trunk-based development, and the song ‘Tiny Bubbles’ by Don Ho. And similar to other song parodies of mine, I sang the first verse of this as my own intro to my recent presentation on ‘Using Experimentation to Deliver Value at Supersonic…
When Consistency becomes Tyranny
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Let me ask you a question: As a product manager or scrum master, do you feel there is a tipping point where consistency devolves into tyranny? I posed this question to some poor unsuspecting peeps at…
Product Owners, why aren’t you talking about how much your team costs?
TL;DR — Not knowing your team cost is like the difference between riding into a debate atop the elephant vs. standing behind it with a shovel. Consider the Cost How much money does your team burn per sprint? Why do I ask? I posed this question a few weeks back on both Twitter and LinkedIn in response to…
Product Manager — CEO or Pirate Captain?
TL;DR: Below be the 7 Arrrrguments based on Black Bart’s Pirate Code of 1722 that suggest that a product manager is more pirate king/queen than CEO. Some CEOs exercise their power to dictate priorities by virtue of possessing the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. According to the 1st Article of the Pirate Code: “Every man…
Please, let’s not toss the PO baby out with the bathwater
TL;DR — The role of the product owner is not to come up with the best ideas, but to create an environment where the best ideas can be surfaced and measured. I read with no small amount of interest Joshua Kerievsky’s “Eliminating the Product Owner Role” after being directed to it via Bob Galen’s response in “Here…
I Am the Product King — (mis)Appropriated Song Tunes For Product Managers
As promised this time last year, after ingloriously delivering ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Product Manager’ at last years ALN lightening rounds, I’m adding to my repertoire yet another adaptation of a popular show tune on behalf of my product management peeps everywhere. This year’s victim is yet another (mis)appropriated Gilbert &…
Productorio — the Seven Deadly Sins of Product Management
In ‘Productorio’, a poem by Dante’s lesser-known younger brother Dino, we read the account of a well-meaning product manager at the shores of a large machine learning implementation. There, he meets with the poet Yourdon, who proceeds to walk Dino down Product Purgatory’s iteration roadmap, making sure to swerve into each of the seven infamous…
The Orange Quarrel: A Product Manager’s tale of Compromise over Collaboration
Photo Credit of Nick Jr. and Yorgos probably not wrestling over an orange: Wikipedia As product managers, we are sometimes confronted with “feature hostage negotiations.” Here are some conflict resolution tips for such times. You know what I’m talking about, those emotional instances where the tug between sales needing shiny objects and stakeholders seeking strategic…
T is for Testable - Part 6 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories
TL;DR — Equipping your PBIs with a clear and concise user acceptance criteria is the how you can ensure doneness across your team, stakeholders, & customers. I think it was Zig Ziglar who said “If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time.” While he made that comment in the context of personal development, it…